Sweet Basilico showed promise but fell short as so many others have done
I like
Estes Park. I really do. How can I
not like a town whose main street is filled with pedestrian shopping, window shopping and heading for a place to eat? It's the eating part that is at issue here. After hiking or snowshoeing or skiing or when we have out-of-town visitors in tow, we tend to stop in Estes Park for a bite to eat. I always have high hopes for a really good meal, but virtually every restaurant disappoints,and we never go back. We find ourselves returning to
Ed's Cantina. It doesn't serve the best Mexican food on the planet, but it's a lot better than most other places we've tried.
Disclaimer: I haven't tried every place in town -- and we do tend to stop for a bite between the park's Beaver Meadows entrance and downtown and in downtown itself. I have not eaten at the Stanley Hotel in years and usually feel to post-hike-y to step into this classy place.The Dunraven Inn is only open for dinner, by which time we're usually back in Boulder, and for some reason, I've never yet made it to the Baldpate Inn, which is closed in winter and has changing hours between high and shoulder seasons.
A few weeks ago, when I was traveling, my husband and a friend wanted to try
Sweet Basilico after hiking, but there was such a long wait that they went next door to the Estes Park Brewery with its uninspired pub food. With high hopes, we went there yesterday. It was raining, so the patio was out of the question. Within the low-slung building is a large old-timey dining room with knotty-pine tongue-and-groove wainscoting, pictures of Italy on the walls above and tables set with plastic cloths and paper placemats. Five chairs at the open kitchen welcomes solo diners. The restrooms -- at least the ladies' room -- really needed attention.
La Cucina
Sweet Basilico laims that everything is fresh and made to order. The sure manage to hide that. As at so many Estes Park restaurants, it is geared to customers with middle-American tastes: soft bread or rolls with salted butter, Saltine crackers with every soup, tedious salads often with bottled salad dressing, wilted vegetables, overcooked pasta drowned in too much sauce and so on. Sweet Basilico's food was certainly edible, but IMHO not worth a second visit.
Another disclaimer. My husband who grew up in Nevada but whose parents came from Minnesota and our friend who is from Indiana thought the food was fine. I grew up in Connecticut, went to college in Boston and lived in New York and Hoboken, New Jersey, with a 45% Italian population when I moved there. My expectations of Italian food exceeded Sweet Basilico's fare -- of maybe it's just that I'm a food snob!
If you order a soup and salad, as I did, you have a choice of a large soup and a small salad, or a small soup and a large salad. Good idea.
Below is the minestrone,the only soup available. It seems to have been made either with a tomato soup base or possibly with diluted tomato juice and then spiced to pleasant pepperiness. I commend the kitchen for not oversalting, but other than that? Sigh. The vegetables and legumes were of decent variety, but most seem to have come from cans. I think the onions, celery and carrots might have been fresh-cut, but I don't think the tomatoes or limp string beans were fresh. It's OK to use.chickpeas and red beans from a can,. And the overcooked broccoli flowerets would have better relegated to the compost bin.
The salad was mostly iceberg lettuce. Iceberg lettuce? In the 21st century? In an Italian restaurant? Indeed, with a choice of three dressings. Sliced carrots, halved cherry tomatoes, unpeeled cukes julienned yellow squash and one each pickled red and green pepper. Long live peperoncini! Large and small salads are shown below.
Chicken mozzarella is white meat topped with mozzarella and baked with sautéed vegetables and served over spaghetti. The vegetables plunked on the pasta and the chicken were thick spears of carrot, red pepper, chunks of zucchini and more of that unappealing broccoli. Let's just say that presentation is not a strong point.
The cannelloni consisted of what tasted like sloppy Joe filling stuffed into two rolled crepes with melted mozzarella swimming in a sea of pedestrian red sauce and a black olive or two as garnish..
Price check: At lunch, soups, salads and combos, $6.50-$850; sandwiches, $7.95 including minestrone or pasta salad; pasta, $8.95 (extra for cheese ravioli); chicken or shrimp entrees, $9.95; pizza, $4.95 for a plain "mini" to #18.95 for a fully loaded large; sides, $1.75-$3.95.
Urbanspoon.com inexplicably does not list any restaurants in Estes Park. They cover hamlets like Arboles, Blanca, Eads, Kersey, Pine, Silt and Wiggins, as well as Grand Lake on the other side of Rocky Mountain National Park, but not Estes Park which attracts hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of visitors from afar as well as almost-locals like us. Go figure.
Sweet Basilico is at 430 Prospect Village Dr., Estes Park; 970-586-3899.

Another Mediocre Meal in Estes Park